When I was homeless, my camp was over there in Spotsylvania on route 2 right behind Simms Furniture out by Shannon Airport. I was sitting there underneath a young shade tree. It didn’t have a lot of leaves on it, but it was better than sitting out in the sun. Someone from Micah just pulled up right next to the tree I was under and she came up and said ‘sir, we’d like to give you some food and put you up in a hotel room until Monday if that would be all right with you.’ I thanked her very much…and that’s exactly what she did.
Social services kept me off the street another week or so and then it was right back on the street again. I left the hotel room and I had to go ask somebody to please help me get a bus so I could go back to my camp. I had a cell phone at that time and I was getting ready to call Micah- it had been raining for two days straight and I was soaking wet with a cup of coffee in my hands at Wawa out front under the awning. I had her card in my hand and my cell phone…and who comes over and taps me on the arm? I looked and it was the lady from Micah! God bless her heart. She said that she had a place for me to go. That was last August.
I’m glad to be off the streets. I’m happy. I really love all ya’ll with Micah. I really do. They are the way God wants us to be on earth.
When I was homeless, finding something to eat was never a problem. I mean, I ate out of dumpsters. The first time I ate out of a dumpster it was just a couple of hot dog rolls…my heart got broken…tears rolled down my face that first time. The second time I just thanked God that it was still there and that there was something to eat.
I’m not greedy, I’m not selfish, and I’ve never been materialistic. I bought a brand new house in 1993- brand new. It was a model home out in Spotsylvania, and after 13 years of marriage and 2 kids, my wife wanted a divorce. I signed over the house to her because I didn’t want my kids to be homeless or bouncing around from town to town or house to house…I paid for everything. I wanted them to grow up in the neighborhood and have their friends. My son is 28 my daughter is 24.
I was walking down the street with my duffle bag with me and a man sitting on his front porch asked me, ‘what’s the matter young man? You look like you just lost your best friend’ and I said ‘well, I just became homeless.’ Him and his wife had a basement apartment and they invited me in to live with them. All I had to do was work for them 4 hours a day for my room and board.
One day I was getting ready to go out the front gate to go out to McDonalds for something and the neighbor asked me, ‘Scott, would you mind covering my air conditioning for me?’ She had a window unit air conditioner and she wanted me to cover it for her because it was October, 2010 and she just wanted me to cover up the outside of it with a trash bag to keep the cold air from coming in. I went out back and got the ladder, got up on it, climbed up and covered the top and the sides of the air conditioner. I stepped down to do the rest of the sides and the bottom of it and the ladder started falling back away from the house. I had nothing to grab onto or stop it along the way, so I ended up landing on the back of my head on a concrete slab on her driveway. I ended up fracturing my skull pretty bad. I don’t know why it didn’t kill me. I guess God wants me here for a reason. I don’t know what it is- He didn’t tell me.
After that I was homeless again. I stayed homeless for a long time. It’s hard to take care of yourself when you’re homeless…especially when you’re disabled and in a wheelchair. It messed up my memory when I fractured my scull. It messed up my brain and my balance. That’s why I’m in a chair- I’m a fall risk. Not all of us are there because we want to be. I have no family to take me in- I have family, but they wouldn’t leave their dogs out in the elements that I was left in, but they’ll let their dogs and cats in- that’s really mean to me. I was homeless January 2010 until last August.
My mom got another boyfriend after him. I worked for him since I was 10 or 11 until I was about 17 years old at a carpet store, then I got a job in commercial printing. It’s like a museum kind of trade. I was a book-binder, paper cutter operator and paper folder operator. I was also a supervisor here and there from June of 1983- March of 2009. The place I was working at in northwestern Indiana was a place called Hammond- they had been in business over 50 years when I got there and they shut the place down in March of 2009 because of the economy and change of technology. Everybody is advertising online now instead of on paper. It costs a lot of money to print it and mail it through the postal service. I tried to get another job in printing and people kept telling me to ‘check back in 6 months.’ I was about 44 years old and I would have taken a job doing anything. I became homeless.